Grrl Power #1446 – Tropical storm Leander
Working out is hard when you can lift the entire gym.
The bottom-left panel is supposed to be a hypothetical Everglades post-maximum Maxima event. I assumed Willy Crocman would make that obvious-ish, but the background could also be interpreted as Monument Valley after being pounded to sand. There’s not a whole lot of crocodiles in Utah, though, generally speaking.
Maxima’s outfit has to basically be printed onto her skin, and while makeup and grease paint don’t stick to her, it’s not like nothing at all does. A wacky wall walker would probably stick to her well enough. Probably one of those rubber stickers that are used on windows. Those might use the same technology, come to think of it. Cora and Galen found some material that basically won’t come off her skin if she’s exerting even the smallest amount of “personal force field” to envelop the stuff, and embedded thousands of micro holo projectors in it. The projection overlaps, so she’ll still have coverage if she loses small patches during the fight, and if large enough bare patches cause her disguise to start to fail, the stuff will slither around and attempt to close the gaps, but that’s dangerous during a fight because it can’t migrate anywhere while her force field is holding it in place. The plan at that point is for her to shift “Armor” into “Speed,” and keep out of danger for the 10-15 seconds it would take her smart cat suit to rearrange itself.
It is conceivable then, that if enough of the outfit was damaged all at once, she could find herself on Space-TV in front of a trillion viewers wearing nothing but pasties. But that’s a risk any superhero or heroine takes when they get into high-powered fights in front of a bank, and they are tougher than their own clothes.
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I know they have shared showers and everything and but that first panel of Max assumedly flashing Syd as she changes is kinda wild. They’ve all just gotten super comfortable with each other. Is that the Dabbler effect?
I think it’s just the context… Max wouldn’t have any problem in this situation (as long as Dabbler isn’t around), since as a soldier, she’s going to be used to not always having privacy. She’d have a lot more problem if, say, Hiro was in the room.
at least the comment says she’s wearing pasties, so it’s officially decent (except for the superball)
Think of it as a changing room at the pool. That’s basically what she’s doing there, and that’s a context where people are generally OK with (semi-)public nudity.
Footloose?
FOOTLOOSE? Really???
*groan*
:)
Should that be “keep the full extent of my powers a secret”?
Being tougher than your own clothes is a problem, physics should be rewritten to make my clothes last longer for financial reasons.
Hmmm, random thought. Has Max ever tried “shrinking” her power pool? Or putting points into a “reserve” that doesn’t do anything but store the power? Might let her power down a some to challenge herself.
I think she does that all the time. I don’t know if her powers work in a way that lets her hold reserves but I assume most interactions she’s operating at her lowest levels of power possible so a random punch doesn’t cause her enemy’s head to explode or so she can open a door or shake a hand without crushing it. I don’t think it’s about challenging herself as much as rarely reaching that upper limit to begin with. Unless she’s fight heavy hitters like Vehemence or Darude she just doesn’t get to experience that too often. Maybe with all their new resources they can magic science together like a training dimension or something eventually.
In addition to strength, her speed would have to be at the bare minimum at all times she was interacting with other people. Especially while holding a conversation. Waiting on the other person to croak out one phoneme at a time would eventually drive a true speedster insane.
One of my RPG characters had that problem — but in her case, it wasn’t that she was tougher than her cloths, she was tougher than her *skin*.
So her idea of “nudity” was being stripped down to her nigh-indestructable cyborg chassis, looking something out of a Terminator movie. And since wearing clothes wasn’t really practical until she’d replaced the organic layers, she ended up attending a formal event wearing nothing more than rank insignia stencilled on her metal frame.
Wouldn’t the old nuclear testing range in the nevada desert be a safe spot for Max to practice?
You’d get all the fringe groups yelling that she’s destroying the planet by stirring up THINGS that will kill us all.
The human race has had extensive experience with radiation at this point, and because of those fringe groups the US is STILL pretending there’s some magical level of zero radiation and zero chemicals that will get rid of cancer forever. Experience doesn’t show that, but the paradigm went into law nearly seventy years ago IIRC, and it’s still there.
And we’re still doing it! All these panicky “news” bits about micro plastics, but none of them ever get around to mentioning there’s natural generation of tiny plastics by bacteria, somehow nobody wants to get samples from mummies and such to establish a baseline of nano plastics pre industry, it’s just numbers. Numbers without baselines are just counting stuff. And not very well, per some of the actual papers out there. Science does baselines, science gives accurate counts or gives you a +- XXX or a standard deviation/sigma – some level to the uncertainty above or below a baseline. Did some heavy searching of journals and abstracts last year, didn’t find much of that at all.
And, BTW, if you’re into that kind of thing, you have to keep track of the unreliable “journals” that have poor or no peer review and the retracted papers. Thank GAWD for places that keep track of those lists.
Ok OK, “went into federal regulations”.
That’s really just semantics, but people LOVE to play semantic games.
Natural generation of microplastics by bacteria, with no fossil fuel involvement, is an assertion I have not seen before. My attempts to learn more through various searches have turned up nothing. Even Wikipedia makes no mention of this idea. Do you have a source?
While the American Crocodile does live in the Everglades, most people associate Florida with alligators since they live all over the state, including the Everglades. Crocs only live in the very Southern tip of the state, and most people don’t even know that North America has crocodiles.
A gator man might be better than a croc man for clarity, is all I’m saying. Though I thought it was pretty clear regardless.
[Reading Dave’s post] Do you mean “Willy Gatorman”?
The American Crocodile lives in the Southern tip of Florida, including the Everglades. I actually posted a comment about this right before yours appeared, saying most people associate Florida with gators and don’t even know that there are crocs in North America.
Short for Sydney’s last line there?
“BTDT”.
Ah, “World of Cardboard” references. Nicely done.
Sydney’s taken off her new knockers?
So Maxima is going commando then?
Not trying to derail this fun arc, but while going all-out wouldn’t be possible on the Earth without revealing her power levels, she’s had the ability to travel to the moon for a while. She would need a life-support system for the trip, but it’s been stated that she can take that off for a short period while she cuts loose on the dark side.
And with Cora, she now has access to any number of uninhabited planets with a breathable atmosphere where life hasn’t evolved yet. Or even without the breathable atmosphere if she’s wearing that mask.
It’s very unlikely that a lifeless planet will have a human-friendly atmosphere. Earth only has gaseous oxygen because it is constantly being regenerated by plants – without that, it would eventually all react away and get locked in rust & rocks.
That Gator looks like he could get a job at a Circus…or as a Truck Driver.
So you’re saying Maxima DID perform Footloose once in her life. Looking forward to that backstory page. :D